


How Ao3 is Important to the Social Experience of Popular Media Online (or; my cited ramble of how great ao3 is for fandom)

by Stedler2 (k9cat)



Category: No Fandom, University Essay
Genre: AHIST 251 Art of the Internet, Gen, This is Literally my Essay, and how it supports fandom, and how well it functions lets fandom flourish here., and that the site itself, any fan work is allowed, by being open to anyone and having it be a safe space, for my Art History class, i hope the bibleography links still work in the fic, its about how the Archive is important to the experience of fandom, no barrieres or restictions, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 06:13:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23346727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/k9cat/pseuds/Stedler2
Summary: My Art History Essay, really, this is an essay for my uni class, i thought it was appropriate to post it here and submit it this way.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	How Ao3 is Important to the Social Experience of Popular Media Online (or; my cited ramble of how great ao3 is for fandom)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, this isn't a fic, but an essay for my Art History class, Art of the Internet, but if anyone else than my Prof reads this, than i hope you enjoy it! 
> 
> true word count of the Essay is 1859, the rest is the bibliography

Hugo award winning website for Best Related Work, Archive of Our Own (Ao3) is important to the social experience of popular media on the internet. Ao3 is a non profit, non commercial, fan created and fan run archive that houses and stores transformative works such as fanfiction, fan art, fan videos and podfics (Archive of Our Own). It is a project of the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW) which strives to provide access and to preserve the history of fan works and fan cultures (Organization for Transformative Works ). The goals of providing access and preserving history are accomplished over six projects, and Ao3 is one of the most recognisable of them, with 5814 000 works in its archive and 2420000 users registered with an account to date. Three ways that Ao3 is important is that it provides free and open access to its archive to any user, with or without an account, the content of the site in unrestricted, any and all transformative works are accepted, and the functionality and backbone of the site shows that if people care about keeping something safe and secure, it will happen.

Archive of Our Own was founded in 2008 and created by the Organization for Transformative Works with the intent of fan content creators, who were primarily women, making a safe and secure place where they could control what was done to their own work. Which was in opposition to a company called FanLib, one of many companies which attempted to commodify and exploit the fan community that created and consumed those works (Romano). A LiveJournal post by astolate in 2007 was the spark to create the project in the first place. Writing a manifesto like post that outlined and spoke about goals that were, and still are important to Ao3 and the community surrounding it. Which has been successful for creating Ao3 the way it is today with all the listed points successfully executed in the operating website today (astolat). The construction and success of Ao3 can also be contributed to other fiction sites purging and deleting unapproved works and blogs that mostly contained queer, slash and femslash fiction. This was the result of other people outside the fan communities believing that it was reprehensible. A lively Tumblr post shows a great discussion on how the LiveJournal events, Strikethrough and Boldthrough, and other sites like Dreamwidth were targeted to take down and delete these communities because these works and people did not fit a ‘moral standing’ that was acceptable. This reinforced the idea that there needed to be a safe and secure place where content creator and fans could directly control the works they created (olderthannetfic). This foundational work of making an open access site that is non commercial and prioritizes the security of the fans and the work people create, without worry of lawsuits and other copyright infringement if the property creators went after the fan content was a huge step in making fandom what it is today. It is a security net that allowed people to talk and discuss their favorite media with other fans, and let it become more mainstream and acceptable. The success of the Archive to this day has shown how important and necessary such a service was, and still continues to be.

Another important feature of Ao3 that was contested over on LiveJournal and other fiction sites is the idea of gatekeeping and restricting what type of content that was deemed acceptable or unacceptable to write or create content for. Archive of Our Own had no restrictions on any content uploaded to its servers. LiveJournal Strikethrough and Boldthrough were moral crusades of the time that condemned the worst aspects of the internet. First intent was to actually take down abusive and other illegal content such as pedophilia, rape, and incest. Yet within that net of content were slash communities and other queer spaces which discusses and tagged related subjects. At that time in the early 2000’s homosexuality was illegal and homophobia was rampant through society, and hate on anything but the social norm was common, which still continues to this day (olderthannetfic). Ao3 allows healthy exploration of grave and serious topics by allowing people to talk about it. This gave a place for survivors to work through trauma with a secure place for their creative outlet and lets people communicate upon such stories. The Tumblr thread also discussed this topic, and how the restriction of what type of content usually leads to a slippery slope of more and more banned content articles, and allowing harassment to those who explore and create outside the perceived moral standing.

The fiction site fanfiction.net (ff.net) has a guidelines page of what is acceptable and what is not allowed content, including that the content ratings can not exceed mature or explicit, and how the fic itself cannot be written. Some of which are; one or two liners, real person fiction, second person/you based, and chat/script format fiction, all valid and creative writing styles (fanfiction.net). ‘Second person/you based’ is the writing style of second person point of view (usually formatted so that it is the point of view being the author as if they are in the story itself), so ff.net completely restricted a whole writing style because of what type of fiction people were writing with it, which is honestly ridiculous. This restriction of content that is allowed to be posted halts and stifles the community’s exploration of the source media itself, which in turn restricts who enjoys the content and diminishes the fandom and fan community around it as a whole. Alongside the no restriction policy, Ao3 is a voice against censorship and restriction of information in general. On February 29th, 2020, Archive of Our Own was blocked from mainland China after one fanfic from a popular drama show was reported and asked to be banned (kari-izumi). This resulted in the whole Archive now completely inaccessible to those on mainland China because the fanfic explored gender identity for a character. Archive of Our Own, and its team does their best to protect fanfiction and creators from such censorship. Where on previous sites, if it was reported, it was taken down, deleted and banned, because other people did not like what was being created (olderthannetfic). Even today, there are people pushing for laws and restriction on the internet for who can control who sees what part of it, and what is posted to it in the first place. Archive of Our Own stands right against that in principle by allowing anyone to post any form and sort of transformative work, and allowing anyone to view such works, and this freedom of expression and a secure place to keep it, allows those discussions to take place, and lets the fandom take charge of how they express their enjoyment of the source media.

One more integral part of Archive of Our Own that has it be so beneficial to fandom, and how we experience it, is the formatting and functionality of the site itself. As a non profit, all the funds that run, maintain, and update the site and servers are made by donations and done by people who volunteer their time, efforts and skills to keep the site running (Archive of Our Own Budget). A twitter thread from January 2018, and updated in 2019 and 2020 shows graphs and comparisons of traffic numbers to the site in the first week of each year (Status). From 27.6 million-page views in 2013 to 281 million in 2020, which is ten times increase of page views in seven years. On March 31st, they posted a tweet saying that “AO3 is seeing a dramatic increase in traffic due to current events.” and are needing to change how hits are counted to compensate (Status, twitter.com). Which is in response to the Covid-19 outbreak and the act of social and physical distancing of having everyone be at home, and with presumably more time to enjoy leisure activities such as reading. This shows that Archive of Our Own is a high traffic, high volume site that provides a splendid experience and easy to understand interface that is highly functional in finding works, and sorting out your own fiction into the archive. In comparison to sites like LiveJournal, and fanfiction.net, Ao3 is the high-end sports model of fiction sites. The site is set up so you can look for works in multiple ways. Either a direct search for key words in the search bar, or you can browse through different sorting methods such as ‘works’, ‘bookmarks’, ‘tags’, and ‘collections’ which categorise how people collect and sort the fiction they go through. Or you can through fandoms itself, by which type of media it came from, whether its manga or movies, to video games and other media, Ao3 is versatile. Once you are within a tag or a fandom works page, you can sort and filter even further. By accessing the ‘sort and filter’ sidebar which has ‘including’, ‘excluding’ and ‘more options’ headings that filter through tags within the heading you are already under. You can choose as many or as little filters as you want (Archive of Our Own).

Fanfiction.net, in comparison has a predetermined, set filter system where you pick from the genres, ratings, characters and other attributes dictated by the fic in a dropdown menu, with no other method of cataloging your fic (fanfiction.net). Where as on Ao3 the system is that the tags are user generated. Tag Wranglers, who are volunteers, go through and sort newly generated tags to parent tags and themes, so that it is a branching and related web of links that you can sort by. The user can create a new tag to sort their fic by, or choose from the millions of other tags people have already generated, and with easy of typing into the field bar and seeing what the system generates with a predictive word search. On other social media sites, such as tumblr, one user primarybufferpanel wrote about Ao3 incentivising why you should “Put your work on Ao3 where it can live eternally, I beg you” where they laid out many reasons why Ao3 is the better option because of how it is formatted and archives the work in it web pages, and why making an account makes accessing the archive’s system even more streamlined than when not on an account (primarybufferpanel). Archive of Our Own’s site formatting and organisation is one of the most functional and easy to use fanfiction archive pages on the internet, and a reason why it has been so successful in enhancing and preserving the fandom experience.

Overall, Archive of Our Own is an important part of the experience of media on the internet by providing and keeping a safe place for fan creators to store and share their works publicly while keeping the works under creator control, by allowing anyone to create any type of work without judgement and have a place to share it, and by showing that people will contribute to make that safe place functional and accessible while maintain high quality and standards for function and experience.

# Bibliography

 _Archive of Our Own_. 2007. 25 March 2020. <https://archiveofourown.org/>

_Archive of Our Own Budget_. 3 April 2019. 29 March 2020. <https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/12422>

astolat. _fanlore.org_. 17 May 2007. 29 March 2020. <https://fanlore.org/wiki/An_Archive_Of_One%27s_Own_(post_by_astolat)>

_fanfiction.net_. 20 November 2008. 29 March 2020. <https://www.fanfiction.net/guidelines/>

kari-izumi. _tumblr_. 1 March 2020. 29 March 2020.

<https://kari-izumi.tumblr.com/post/611396871190085632/this-right-here>

<https://k-odyssey.tumblr.com/post/611652762754859008/china-has-censored-the-archive-of-our-own-one-of>

olderthannetfic. _tumblr_. 1 March 2018. 27 March 2020. <https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/171430070104/maleccrazedauthor-bonibaru-naamahdarling>

_Organization for Transformative Works_. 2007. 25 March 2020. <https://www.transformativeworks.org/>

primarybufferpanel. _tumblr_. March 2020. 29 March 2020. <https://primarybufferpanel.tumblr.com/post/190786207224/archive-your-fic-on-ao3-for-eternal-glory>

Romano, Aja. _Vox_. 19 Augaust 2019. Web article . 20 March 2020. <https://www.vox.com/2019/4/11/18292419/archive-of-our-own-wins-hugo-award-best-related-work>

Status, Ao3. _twitter.com_. 11 January 2020. 29 March 2020. <https://twitter.com/AO3_Status/status/1216055426023936000>

—. _twitter.com_. 31 March 2020. 1 April 2020. <https://twitter.com/AO3_Status/status/1245065074567524353>

**Author's Note:**

> If you care, there is a comment section below, and kudos' are cool if that's your thing. 
> 
> Thanks for Reading!


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